A model for optimal information retrieval over a distributed document collection is described and experimentally evaluated. The fusion of retrieval results corresponding to document subcollections is performed according to the Probability Ranking Principle. Part of the model is a selection criterion for eeectively limiting the ranking process to a subset of… (More)

This paper describes a probabilistic model for optimum information retrieval in a distributed heterogeneous environment. The model assumes the collection of documents offered by the environment to be partitioned into subcollec-tions. Documents as well as subcollections have to be indexed, where indexing methods using different indexing vocabularies can be… (More)